


Visibilium Omnium et Invisibilium

by Paian



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: 5000-10000 Words, Angst, Episode Related, Episode: s05e21 Meridian, F/M, Graphic Sex, Hurt/Comfort, Rare Pairing, Season/Series 05, Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-02-18
Updated: 2009-02-18
Packaged: 2017-10-03 04:16:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Paian/pseuds/Paian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>O'Neill and Fraiser have been carrying on a quiet but passionate and steadfast relationship between the cracks of their professional lives for a while. Daniel's decision in 'Meridian' threatens to end it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Visibilium Omnium et Invisibilium

**Author's Note:**

> Written partly as commentfic and partly as iconfic. The section titles are the names or text of journal userpics.

### Here I Am

She couldn't come. He did everything right, things that always worked -- spread her lips and teased her with dribbles of warming lubricant, teased his way in with gentle, probing thrusts, stroked her nipples with deft, kind fingers, filled her deep and ground against her clit. Just the right pressure and friction -- not so much that it desensitized, not so little that she couldn't push over. She just couldn't push over.

She didn't want to push over.

She also didn't want to psychoanalyze herself right in the middle of sex, but she was pretty sure she knew why she didn't want to push over.

He felt her stop trying; she felt him feel it. He nuzzled up her cheek to her mouth, kissed her lips softly. It was a question.

They'd been friends for a long time. They'd taken care of each other for a long time, quietly off to the side, absolutely discreet as only a medical practitioner and a covert operative could be; grimly aware, as only a medical practitioner and a covert operative could be, that secrets had a tendency to give themselves away.

It had worked for a long time. Both of them refugees from busted marriages, the party to blame in both cases, collateral damage of their own fuck-ups, their own fucked-up priorities. It was professional, practical, no-nonsense, friendly. No seduction, no expectations, just damn good sex.

It wasn't working anymore. OK, she shouldn't generalize; it wasn't working today. But she knew. She could feel the difference. Shared grief should bring them closer, and instead it was putting barriers between the bodies they used to comfort each other with, more impenetrable than the diaphragm and the condom. Death should trigger the biological imperative to make life -- to rut, to climax, to flood the system with endorphins and oxytocin -- but it was triggering her to shut down instead. Denying herself the pleasure that _he_ would never feel again. Balking on approach to the little death, unwilling to go over that ledge even in microcosm, even in metaphor.

She tapped his tailbone lightly with her fingertips, raised her legs and hooked her heels inside his thighs, tilted her hips up, contracted on him. It was _You go ahead_. It was her answer.

They'd never played the _Not without you_ game, never put that kind of pressure on each other. If she couldn't, she couldn't. He'd offer his mouth afterwards, his hand; he was ridiculously good with both. Or in a couple of hours they'd start over. He'd take her doggie-style if she asked him to, grind his cock into the G-spot and piston slicked fingers into her wherever she told him to, and she'd come so hard she'd have to bite her groans into the pillow so the whole motel wouldn't hear. Except she didn't want to come. The prospect of starting over seemed exhausting.

" 'S OK." The low grunt startled her. He rarely said a word in bed. "Gonna pull out."

"Mm-hm," she said, and winced at the slight burn. He didn't roll away onto his back, reach for the cigarette she always shared with him afterwards so she wouldn't feel obliged to give him shit about smoking. He got rid of the condom and gathered her up and pulled the covers over them.

He was tall, athletic, strong, the most classically virile man she'd ever slept with, and the warm safety of his arms should have been a blissful self-indulgence.

She hadn't felt so chilled or alone in a long time.

"This isn't helping," he said quietly, hand scrunching in her hair.

"Sometimes it doesn't," she said, to be kind. He was a good man, a well-meaning man. She knew he believed that Daniel could take human form again if he chose. He knew she believed that death was death; the spirit carried on or it didn't, but either way there would be no coming back from wherever it went.

"He never belonged to us, Jan." Trying to be kind to her too. "He was just with us for a while."

_But while he was here, we could be with each other. He made us possible. He was our priority. Our tacit, binding, fucked-up priority._

That was the biggest secret of all, unknown even to them. And secrets had a tendency to give themselves away.

Theirs had given himself to Oma.

### Phunked

He tried not to be the kind of guy who took it personally when his partner couldn't or wouldn't come, and with this woman that wasn't an issue. _It's not you_ wasn't the kind of line they handed each other. Been around the block too many times for that. Both knew the score. Sometimes it _was_ you. And sometimes it just wasn't gonna happen.

Hard not to take it personally when it was his own body freezing on him in the jump door, though. Sometimes he couldn't get it up, sometimes he went soft in medias fuck, took either in stride, usually booze or PTSD to blame for it and those were facts of life ... but as long as there was ammo in the clip, he never, ever jammed.

It sure as hell wasn't her. Brilliant, tough as nails, sly-humored and sparkling when she turned on the charm, she was a class act. Indomitable compassion, a lithe shapeliness, body his ideal size for dance partner or bedpartner, cream-soft skin he got hard just thinking about touching -- she knocked his socks off every time he laid eyes on her. He trusted her to a degree that he'd trusted maybe ten people in his life outside his team. And, all due respect to his ex and a few especially talented professionals, she gave the best damned head he'd ever gotten.

She was giving it now. And it wasn't gonna happen.

Shouldn't have said yes to the blowjob. Losing Daniel had fucked them both up -- fucked everybody up, shook that mountain down to its foundations -- and all the bereavement clichés aside, sex wasn't always the magic cure. Right on the brink herself, she'd gone dead underneath him, all the heart gone out of her, and he hadn't really had the heart for it himself; after he'd pulled out and tucked her in close, he should have kept holding her, massaged her to sleep, offered a drink, a warm shower, something. But when a woman like that ran soft, full lips down your belly to your groin, stroked your nuts with deft, capable fingers, said "Let me do this, at least" and "I want to" in a rich contralto that had never lied to you, in a wash of hot breath over your cock, you didn't say no.

Her tongue swirled and teased, her lips rode a slick coating of spit, her head circled and bobbed, her fingers caressed and squeezed, and he couldn't shoot; there was some safety he couldn't thumb off. The better it felt the more pressure built up and the worse it felt.

_Stop,_ he said. No sound came out of his throat. _Janet. Stop._ He couldn't wrap his lips and tongue around her name.

On the third try it came out, a low rasp.

She froze. It wasn't the same as just stopping. For a long moment she didn't pull off. She didn't look up. Then she blinked, hard, and opened her mouth and lifted her face to him. His dick dropped onto his abs with a soft slap. Her fingers withdrew and his sac hung heavy between his thighs. He swallowed against the persistent collision of _fuck gotta come, gotta come so bad_ and _can't, can't, can't_. It was uncomfortable and it was bewildering and it was nothing compared with the bleak shock he saw in her eyes. A reaction that had nothing to do with oral sex that wasn't working.

He felt his pupils dilate, a trickle of icy realization slither through his gut.

Fuck.

Ah, _fuck_.

_That's exactly the way I said it, isn't it. That's what I said to Jacob in the room._

He didn't have to say the words out loud. He saw her see them in his expression. Felt her response in the hand she laid on his thigh as she pushed up sitting.

She wouldn't have let him go -- _that's why I'm the one he tapped, that's why his fucking astral-plane hand fell on my shoulder_. Three of them in that room with the authority to give the order and only two of them close enough for him to approach and only one of him who'd cave. When a guy with a mind and heart and guts like that looked at you with eyes like that and told you to let him go on the biggest adventure of his life instead of hauling him back into a permanently crippled body and a life that he considered a failure ...

He'd objected, but he hadn't said no.

She'd have said no.

She pivoted on her butt to throw her legs over the edge of the bed. She put her hands on the mattress to either side, leaned forward as if to get up, but didn't get up.

He rolled over his hip and came around behind her, framing her legs with his, wrapping her up in his arms, burying his face in her hair.

She patted his forearm, gave a rub and a squeeze. "I don't blame you. Don't think that."

He ignored the painful ricochet off his family history, old old habit, and thought, _It's what he wanted._ But was it? Or was it what Oma Desala wanted, and wanted him to believe that Daniel wanted? Had the whole thing been a mindfuck, had he been spectacularly duped?

"Then you believe what I told you," he said. Knew it was a mistake the minute the words came out: she'd hear him fishing, clear as the whirr of the reel and the soft plunk of the sinker across a pond on a dead-still morning.

She twisted to look up at him, her gaze sharply assessing. "Do you believe it?"

He could still hear the note in her voice, the broken way she'd called to him over the electronic drone when the EKG flatlined. That desperate appeal was the closest she had ever come, would ever come, to trading on their private thing. He'd almost given in, because it was her, because he had never heard that note in her voice, because she was begging him as much as warning him: _Don't make me let him go_. But he had, and they saw him go -- they _saw_ him rise up into tendrily energy. They saw him transform, saw scrubs and wrappings collapse into the empty space left when his body turned into light. But there was no difference to her between that quick, bright passage and the slow transformation of a corpse into worm castings. All death was transformation. It didn't make her hate it any less.

It didn't make her any more inclined to mythologize it.

She was twice as lapsed a Catholic as he was. He had no use for the Church they'd been raised in; she despised it. But he still believed in God. Hated His guts as much as any snake's, but couldn't shake the belief that He existed. Had it made him fundamentally gullible? As naive as any bucolic shepherd wowed and cowed by a set of glowy eyes and a hand device?

"Jack?" she prompted, a low warning in it, verging on Physician Voice, but he couldn't, he couldn't tell her this, if it was true and he'd been conned -- she'd trusted his word, that single word, obeyed his command -- she had and Jake had and Jake's snake had, because it was him giving the order, because it was _Daniel_, because _they trusted him with Daniel_ \--

He couldn't tell her. Maybe he was, maybe he wasn't; he couldn't plant that seed of doubt in her mind. They'd both lost a friend and he'd lost a civilian report but she'd lost a _patient_ \-- whole nother brand of bitter failure and crushing recrimination there. Last thing she needed was to add his crisis of belief to what she already carried.

They were responsible for him, the two of them. The two people directly responsible for him in the field and on base. For him more than anyone else, more than any of the other priceless irreplaceable people on that team or in that mountain, because he was the key to it all, the heart of it all. The two of them more than Hammond or his teammates, because Hammond had to run the whole show and all three specialists were responsible for each other equally. That's what had bonded him and her, down deep, down under the natural attraction of good-looking, competent people with equally battered romantic histories who worked in each other's pockets doing an insane job and wanted the same things in the bedroom. It had been Daniel all along.

What a crazy fucking thing to realize. What a crazy fucked-up way to realize it.

What a crazy, fucked-up, crappy way to find out that losing Daniel might be the end of it.

"Just checking," he said, giving her a squeeze and rolling away across the bed to reach for the pack of Winstons and the Bic on the nightstand.

It wasn't completely untrue -- he had been checking. But it was the first time he'd ever lied to her in private.

She was the first woman he'd ever slept with that he hadn't lied to, one way or another, and it was the first time he'd ever lied to her at all.

He lit the smoke and lay back and dragged death into his lungs, as deep as he could get it to go.

### In the Mind's Eye

She dug around in the rumpled bedding for something to keep the chill off, and when what she came up with was his flannel shirt, she pulled it on. They'd never had to worry about coming home with each other's smell on their clothes. No one at home who ever got close enough, that way, to notice.

When he offered her the cigarette, she shook her head.

He needed reassurance that she believed him about carrying out Daniel's wishes. She was unnerved to hear Daniel more than Jack in the wry voice in her head saying _That can't be good_. But she'd been an idiot to plant the seed of blame by denying blame. _Methinks, doth, protest, yadda_ \-- with either a credible impersonation of his ex-wife, or an unforgivably thoughtless insinuation about her.

_This is what happens_, she thought -- only her own mind-voice this time. This was what happened when you conducted a relationship between the cracks of the professional and the intimate. What she'd said, she wouldn't have been so inconsiderate as to say to a husband -- not even _her_ ex-husband, not even considering that her own neglect was the catalyst for his transformation into the bitter, vengeful man she'd divorced -- and she wouldn't have had the audacity to say to the colonel. They didn't play at being something they weren't, but they were only a fraction of what they were in their work context, and only a fraction of what they would have been if they had the freedom to give each other the attention lovers gave; they diminished themselves by conducting this interstitial affair.

But of course it would seem that way now, without Daniel anymore to make it make its twisted sense.

_What would Daniel do?_ she asked herself, and the answer was immediate and simple: Say something true.

Sitting cross-legged in the middle of the bed, her hands in her lap, she said quietly, "I do believe you with regard to his wishes. Can I tell you why?"

"Yeah," he said. Not _Sure_, not roughing it off; not _Of course_, not pretending it was no big deal; and not _Whatever_. He never whatevered her. His calm gaze was intent and distant at the same time. He was wreathed in smoke, as if they were looking at each other through a fog now, a mist of grief and lost purpose.

"Because whether or not it was a genuine otherdimensional experience, and whether you were talking to Daniel or someone else if it was, _you knew what he wanted_. Even if it was a hallucination, a construct your own mind generated to get through to you, the message it delivered was the truth. What I believe is that you _know_ him, that deeply and that well. Nobody could have snowed you on this one, honey. Not even Daniel. I believe that even if he'd claimed that he didn't want to go, even if he'd tried to give up what he wanted and stay for us, you'd have seen through it."

His expression opened into surprise that morphed quickly into a shouldn't-be-surprised-by-you wryness, then eased; his eyes warmed, and cleared, and focused fully on her. As if all the barriers had come down, just like that. And maybe they had. She felt something ease in her own chest, now that the words were said. A tightness she hadn't known was there, a subliminal weight, lifting.

"Let us believe in you until you can believe in yourself again, huh," he said -- adapting an old AA saying, knowing she'd get the allusion.

_And love, too,_ she said with a gentle squeeze to his knee -- deliberately, because she didn't need to be his doctor to know that his knees were where he felt weakest and most vulnerable, and because the L word was inadequate to encompassing what they had, and most powerful when left unsaid between them. "If I learned anything from Our Lady of Perpetual Bingo, it's how to proselytize. Do _you_ believe _me_?"

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, I do." He quirked a charming smile with half his mouth: "Because _you_ know _me_ that well."

"Well enough to know when you're being devastatingly handsome on purpose, you bastard," she said -- genuine arousal blooming warm and delicious in her loins, as if the weight on her chest had been what was suppressing it, and once that lifted, through some kind of shared absolution or clarity, her libido could kick in again, in overdrive -- and turned her hand, and ran her nails down his calf.

The neglected cigarette had burned down to half an inch of precariously clinging ash; he twisted around to stub it out without letting any fall. "Hey, if we successfully achieve afterglow, I can have another smoke. And maybe actually smoke it." He took a condom packet from the pile between the ashtray and the empty rocks glasses and displayed it as he came back around from the nightstand. "Yes?"

She straddled him by way of an answer, and rubbed him erect with her lips and her wetness while he spread the flannel shirt off her breasts and over her shoulders and away. He ripped open the packet, and she took the rubber and rolled it onto him, and he reached between them and lifted himself for her to slide down on. She took him all the way into her and rocked there, relishing the fullness, contracting on it to stimulate them both. Then she slid her hands down between her legs and spread herself for him, walking her fingertips in for a closer grip to unhood her clitoris. The exposure and the touch of cool air squeezed a preorgasmic surge through flesh that was already engorged and throbbing. _Not yet, not yet,_ she thought, and then laughed, breathless and happy, because _this_ was how it should feel, this was how it should be, clinging to the precipice of orgasm because _it felt so good to hang there_ \-- because this was how it had been before and now it was again and it could still be this way, they could still be what they were, she didn't believe he was coming back but she could believe that he would want this for them and oh _god_ it was so good and she was _so close_.

He didn't bother casting around for the lube. Smiling up at her, eyes dreamy and dark and attentive, he loaded his thumb with spit and pressed it gently to her clit without losing any. He held her gaze with his and rubbed slow, lazy circles around the target, watching, she knew, for the flush down her cheeks and across her chest that would signal him to apply direct pressure.

Abruptly she couldn't wait for herself. "Now," she whispered, "now, now, oh -- " and he spiraled the pad of his thumb in and _pushed_ and she was coming, clenching on his rigid cock, driving down onto it as hard as she could, groping blindly for his left hand to hold her steady against the electric current of sensation his right hand was delivering.

It was nothing like death, little or big. Death was system failure and shutdown. This was a joyful, glorious implosion, visceral and powerful and fierce -- nerves firing in complex arrays, cascades of hormones, a bloom of electrochemical activity. An explosive internal discharge of neuromuscular tensions, one of the body's most forceful exhibitions of its own aliveness. And right at the end of it, when she was gasping "Yes, yes" in huffs of laughing, exultant amazement, she knew with absolute certainty that whatever had happened to Daniel, it wasn't death.

Whatever had happened to Daniel, this was its closest corporeal analogue.

She kept working herself on him as the orgasm passed, hungry to be plundered, primed for harder, deeper use, needing it. He'd closed her vulva around her clit just before the rubbing became unbearable, comforting and covering, palming the mounded flesh to keep some gentle pressure there and give her something to push into if she needed more. Either she telegraphed every phase of orgasm with predictable regularity, or he had a preternatural timing sense she should stop taking for granted. She laid her hand on his now, pressing it tighter while she thrust into it. Nothing left in her clit, battery drained, but the stimulation still felt wonderful. His cock felt better than wonderful, delving her inside.

His left hand felt best of all, fingers interlaced with hers, thumb stroking the mound of her thumb. Death was the absence of life; this, what they were doing now, where they were now, was the definition of presence.

She ran her gaze over his lean, scarred torso, down to where they joined, back up to his chiseled jaw and curved lips. His eyes were smiling. She knew her laughter was infectious. Braced on his steadying arm, she leaned down to kiss him, hoping that her relief would be too.

"What was that for?" he said when she pulled back -- evidence, she thought, that they should kiss a lot more often than they did.

"I'm just glad we can still laugh in bed."

"Baby, I'm glad we're still _in_ bed. Thought this party might be over for a while there."

"I did too. But apparently not."

"Maybe there's some merit to this talking thing."

"Maybe." Still smiling, still holding his right hand on her, she pushed upright and moved her pelvis in a grinding circle. "In moderation," she said, watching his mouth tighten and his eyes crease. Like bartending and prostitution, doctoring came with a built-in sideline in talk therapy; she preferred to keep it to a minimum when she was off duty, and the two of them had always agreed that a good workout, in bed or at the gym, saved an hour on the couch. But sex first hadn't worked this time -- had failed so badly that she'd thought they were done -- and she had to admit that their exchange had flipped the switch for her. Whether it had for him she couldn't tell. He was as hard as she'd ever felt him get, but he'd been just as hard when she was sucking him. She hadn't been watching his face then, didn't know what his expression might have shown when he told her to stop, and what looked like an arousal response now could as easily be a wince of discomfort. "Should I keep doing this?"

"Yes," he said softly. "Christ, yes."

She took both his hands and put them on her breasts, leaning forward a little, pushing into them while she pulled on him, squeezing and circling. "Do you want the back?" she asked. "Do you need it tighter?"

He shook his head, his hot, dark eyes running over her body, his hands shifting to cherish the feel of her breasts. "Just lift a little," he said, voice low and husky and a little tight, the way it got the rare times when he gave instructions in bed. "Let me do the work."

_Now, that's an order I'm happy to follow_. Words had given yeoman service today, but they'd always done better with actions, and the last thing she wanted was to derail another orgasm, especially with yet another carelessly loaded reference, so this time she kept the thought to herself, and just smiled.

### Looking at You

_God she has a beautiful mouth,_ he thought, half hypnotized by the secretive curve to it, half mindless with the need to thrust. She pushed up from her thighs to give him some play in his hips, and he pushed up into her, slow and easy at first while they adjusted the angle, then harder, catching a rhythm. He didn't want to let go of her, wanted to keep feeling her hard nipples fuck the soft center of his palms, but he needed the leverage of his shoulders to drive his dick up, so he slid his hands down her sides, over her hips, outlining her shape on the way down to her thighs. The upside was, now he could see all of her, savor the sight of her impaled on him, tousled and flushed and smoky-eyed, a wet dream incarnate.

She stroked herself -- for his benefit, he thought, but he hoped for her own too: drawing light fingertips up her belly, teasing her navel in little circles, teasing her tits for him, keeping her nipples erect with feathery touches and pulls. He wanted to say _You don't have to, you never needed to seduce me, never need to perform for me, you're beautiful, just be there, just be here with me_, but he never had been able to fuck and chew gum at the same time, and all he could do was grunt, low in his throat, as he pistoned into her and watched her touch herself. She was raising gooseflesh on her own skin with long light scratches of her nails, and that turned him on more than any of it -- seeing her make herself shiver.

He could feel the change around his dick, even through the rubber -- the inside of her body heating and thickening, a cascade of little contractions. Her mouth fell open and her eyes got very dark, and yeah, she was turning herself on all right, and every driving thrust of his dick was making her shiver from the inside out. He'd thought she was done, but he'd thought _they_ were done, turned out they just had to adapt to bonding over transsubstantiated absent guy instead of dead-and-moldering-in-the-ground guy or live freaking-pain-in-the-ass guy, _it ain't over 'til it's over_ \--

She gasped, and groped out into the air, and he gave her his hand, old dancing instinct that reared up in bed all the time, god he wanted to take this woman dancing, take her out on his arm, good jazz, champagne, skirt flowing around her thighs, _it is what it is, lucky to have it, count your blessings_. She gripped his hand hard and groaned through her teeth and said "Can we turn, can we, I think, if we, if you had more," and he surged up and took her in his arms and rolled them, staying in her. "Like this, or you wanna flip over?" he managed, close to losing it as the new position filled him with a primal, rutting power. She locked her legs around his hips in answer and drove him deep with her heels in his hamstrings, nails in his ass, butt lifted to angle his cockhead right into where she wanted it, and he thought _God bless the G-spot_.

He pushed up on his arms so he could see her. She flashed him a bright, fierce smile that dissolved into a tremulous softness of lips and sent a buzz down his spine and a twinge through his nuts. _Not yet, not yet,_ he thought, ignoring the wordless crazy panicked _can't not ever_ underneath it. He drove into her, hard and steady, no jerking impacts -- deep, even, thorough grinding. He knew how she liked this. He _loved_ knowing how she liked this. And he loved knowing the small things, like the move that right now, like this, would make it extra good -- and being tall and rangy and long-armed enough to execute it without smothering her in his chest.

"Do it," she said, half gasping, half growling. "I know you're thinking about it. Do it."

He reached down and under her, around the curve of her tailbone and down the cleft in the sweet round swell of her ass, and rubbed his fingertip into the hole.

She cried out beautifully, musically, spasming and shaking around and underneath him. He was never so aware of the strength of her body as when she came. He heard that note in her voice again, the note her outcry hit when she called to him at the moment Daniel's heart stopped, but context transformed it, like the melody of a death march subsumed into a triumphal symphony, and maybe it would stop haunting him now, maybe when he heard it after this he wouldn't hear that panicked anguish anymore, but transcendent pleasure.

He watched her come, beautiful mouth open and trembling, long lashes squeezed down against flushed cheeks, and thought, _That's it, that's good, that's enough. I don't have to now_.

He did have to. The thick drenched heat of her, the rippling contractions squeezing his dick, the hot scent, the voluptuous flesh, the _fucking_ \-- he had to come so badly his teeth ached. But he couldn't. He couldn't. He'd break.

He had to hold it together, and if he let go he'd come apart.

He'd gone still except for the shaking. He'd stayed still too long for it to be considerate hold-still-through-her-climax stillness. He'd been still so long that her eyes had opened and the blissful haze had cleared and she was looking at him, hard.

He fumbled out, looking away, embarrassed. Her legs slid down his legs and to the sides, but stayed touching, cradling him. Finally he mastered himself, and looked back at her -- direct eye contact, as up-front and open as he knew how to be. He couldn't even say _I can't_. He could feel the helpless plea in his own eyes. He knew she could feel how achingly hard he still was against her.

She reached up and took his chin in her hand -- she had the strongest damned hands he'd ever felt, a drill sergeant's grip -- and said, "_Tell me_."

"I let him go." It burst out of him in a hoarse whisper. He thrust against her, unstoppable reflex, and winced, and groaned: "_I let him go._"

She looked at him for another hard second, and then said, "Off. Roll." When he hesitated, she slid her hands down his arms to the hollows of his elbows and pushed to collapse him, then hooked one of his legs with hers. He knew what came next. He'd taught this move to countless people. The leg hook was optional -- she'd done it to warn him. She bucked her hips powerfully to flip him. He went with it, rolling, and she went with him, coming up against the front of him, capturing both of his legs with her other leg, winding her lower arm around his neck. She reached down and stripped the condom off him and tossed it, and then her hand was on his dick, her drill sergeant's hand, her surgeon's hand -- her skin directly on his skin, a frizz of sweet, electric contact.

She worked his cock with her strong, assured grip and kissed the apologies and protests from his lips and said, "You did. You let him go. I couldn't have done it. I wouldn't have had the courage. I'd have denied his request. _You carried it out._ You were brave enough and you loved him enough to say stop when no one else could have. You can let yourself go, too. I'm here. I've got you. Let go now."

Her hand felt too good, her embrace felt too safe, he couldn't hold it back anymore. He pressed his face against her beautiful, soft-skinned, hard-boned face and came into her hand with a silent, open-mouthed cry. He came so hard the first gush was physically painful, pipes bursting, his guts coming out through his dick, but she held him tight and he held her back and he didn't break apart. She massaged his cock through spurt after exhausting spurt, gentling her touch as the intense climax eased into sublime pleasure. She stroked him and soothed him and eased him down. She kissed his mouth, tenderly, and he thought, _We don't kiss enough. We've gotta kiss more._ Finally she moved her hand from between them and put that arm around him, too, and he squeezed her in, the whole warm wonderful package, and just held her, and breathed.

"You think that's what it felt like for him, maybe, a little bit?" he said, after a while, when she didn't drowse off. "Something like that?"

"Yes, I do. I think it's the closest we can come to knowing what he felt in that moment."

"Still can't convert you to my position that he'll get sick of paradise one of these days and come back to us."

"You know him better than anyone. I'll wait with you. I'll hope with you."

He nodded against her face, then nuzzled, then brushed his lips across hers and lay back. "You want a drink? Warm shower? Massage?"

"Go ahead and have your smoke."

He reached over for the pack, shook one up and pulled it out with his lips. Swapping the pack for the lighter, he said around the filter, "He's still a terrific pain in the ass."

Curled on her side, watching him, she said with wry affection, "Yes, sir. He is."

He never called her on the "sir"s. It was habit, popped out sometimes, no big deal; "sir" and "Colonel" were just names in a list, same as "O'Neill" and "Jack" and "Jonathan" and "mister" and "insolent Tau'ri scum." But this time she was using it as deliberately as the present tense. Letting him know that they were still them, in here and back there -- and that Daniel was still him, out there, somewhere.

He could live with that.

She flopped onto her back while he lit his smoke, then reached two fingers over for the cigarette. They lay shoulder-to-shoulder and finished it together, looking up at the stuccoed motel-room ceiling, watching the curling tendrils of smoke rise towards it and fade from sight in the still air.


End file.
